Playing with fire

Chinese writer Ma Jian's book about Tibet was burned in the streets and banned. But that wasn't enough to silence him. Now living in exile in London, he tells Aida Edemariam why the Olympics are a disaster for his homeland

One day Ma Jian, who grew up in Qingdao, on the Yellow Sea, was returning from the beach when he passed a rubbish collector pushing a cart piled high with books. They had fallen foul of the cultural revolution, and were on their way to a pyre. He asked if he could have one. No, came the answer. Could he just have an illustration then? Permission was reluctantly granted and a page ripped out. And another? Yes - but then the book was snatched away. He kept those pages for years.

The printed word has been Ma's talisman ever since, and he has hung on through thick and thin: being hounded from his state job; his first wife leaving him; having his work banned (he wrote, in Stick Out Your Tongue, of the desecration of Tibet, both from within and without - it too was burned in the streets); going into exile, first to Hong Kong and then - despite the fact that he speaks no English - London; beginning a new life with Flora Drew, his translator and mother of their children, Jack and Isabella.

They met when she was making a documentary on the 1997 Hong Kong handover and he was one of the only locals willing to speak out against China. He gave her his books and proposed within the week (they still haven't quite managed the marriage bit). Their white living room, where he sips chrysanthemum tea and watches her carefully convert his words into English, contains novels by Nabokov and DH Lawrence; a photograph of Samuel Beckett hangs on the study wall. It is a far cry from the devastation of his latest novel, Beijing Coma, which is narrated by a victim of the Tiananmen Square massacre who, though paralysed, lives long enough to see his apartment block razed by developers.

The 54-year-old has never been able to leave his homeland completely behind, and when we met he was preparing to return to Beijing, something he does a couple of times a year, this time to soak up the atmosphere. "The government has called on its people, asking for self-sacrifice, for people willing to devote themselves to the nation, and it has picked out its own heroes - it's just like the great mass movements of the past." We may read stories of lessons in English and etiquette, but Ma has heard of more sinister controls at work. "Street hairdressers have been given red armbands, and are able to report any misdemeanours or bad behaviour to the government - anyone who stands out from the crowd, anyone who might arouse suspicion, people who have come in from the countryside to petition the authorities about local injustices, people who are shabbily dressed - these people with red armbands have the authority to make citizen's arrests or to hand them over to the police."

Students on holiday have been told to stay in their home towns, he says; Beijing citizens have been informed it's best to leave the streets clear for foreigners; artists have been prevented from returning to China or had exhibitions banned: "There are fascistic elements to it, this idea of the mass cleansing, the purging of the city, of the disabled and mentally unstable, of all subversives and outsiders." He is especially struck by the fact that a key Olympic route has been designed by the son of Albert Speer, Hitler's favourite architect.

And in these crackdowns he sees both hubris and fear. On the one hand, there is "inflated pride; the fusion of years of nationalistic propaganda, with the economic powerhouse China has become, has created a feeling that it's now the centre of the world, and that foreigners come to them with begging hands." At the same time, he believes, "the root of this desire to put on a great show stems from the authorities' own loss of faith in themselves. And they also realise that, despite the great rise in nationalism, the people don't believe in this empty ideology either."

When he returned before, he thought there was a real excitement about the Olympics, a feeling that China's time had come. "But slowly, especially in this last year, there's been a change of mood, and many people are beginning to feel as though they are pawns in a huge game, that their lives have actually become less free; more restricted. There's this great feeling of nervousness." And "a country that relies on police, on the military, to retain control will find that in such a situation any underlying discontent will burst out". He notes that in the past few months there have been spontaneous revolts in Yunnan, in Guangxi, and in Guizhou province, where locals burned down the public security office. Last month, a man called Yang Jia murdered six policemen. "He has now become a sort of national hero." This month, in Kunming in south-west China, two buses were bombed. "The government said this is nothing to do with the Olympics but there is a feeling that there is some organised effort to make a stand." This week, 16 policemen were killed in a grenade attack in the north-west region of Xinjiang.

Does he really think that the games could be used as a focus for organised insurrection, as Gorbachev's visit in 1989 (and the death of reformist secretary general Hu Yaobang) was used in the marches on Tiananmen? "I feel that the general mood in the country is that they're waiting. There's almost an expectation of some sinister event. And it's not just the people who are feeling nervous - it's the whole nation, including the authorities. There's almost this feeling of impending doom. You go on to the tube in Beijing and you're checked as thoroughly as if you're boarding a plane. Tiananmen Square, that vast, supposedly public plaza, is riddled with plainclothes policemen who check your shoes and bags. So one has to ask oneself, 'What has this event given to China?' It was supposed to bring China into the west. But all it has achieved is the demolition of great swathes of traditional Chinese life. All that's left now is the Communist party and possibly 80 national leaders attending the opening ceremony and a few sportsmen fighting over gold medals."

Ma's critics believe that this is a characteristic bitterness; that he has been away from China too long to have any effect within it, and that his fiction is too focused on a Manichean past for his fast-modernising countrymen, and inaccessible to westerners. This is perhaps a bit harsh. And Ma, for his part, believes that there is an important place for acts of witness, that individual and collective memory must be fought for. A striking theme in Beijing Coma, for example, is its illustration of how humiliation and fear are internalised by families and passed down, largely as amnesia. Ma's hero, Dai Wei, grows up hating his father because he spent years in a "reform through labour" camp, meaning Dai is scorned at school and his mother alienated by the party; only when, after his father's death, he finds diaries describing the starvation in these camps, the torture, the small acts of heroism, does he understand what made his father the broken man he knew.

Ma's grandfather, a landlord and tea connoisseur, was executed in the cultural revolution, but his father never spoke of it. Decades passed before Ma visited his ancestral village and discovered small facts, such as how tall his grandfather was, and that he had just started up a cultural troupe when he died, but "I couldn't ask why was he arrested, who arrested him, where was he taken, how exactly did he die - there was no way of finding out. But it made me understand why my father lived in such fear all his life. And it was only when my father died that I found in his drawer a self-criticism he'd written, and realised that he lived in constant fear of being arrested." There was no grave, and no bones, but before he left Ma took a clod of earth, buried it, and gave it a gravestone.

And the pattern has been repeated in Ma's life: he has been a target of government surveillance since his mid-20s; by the time he was 30 his ex-wife, a dancer in a propaganda troupe, severed his contact with their daughter, Nannan. He can talk to her now, but he is dismayed about the extent to which she has absorbed the party line. She refuses to visit him in Britain, and nags him not to meet certain friends; she has stopped reading the BBC cuttings he sends her about China because she says they're too negative. "There is an inescapable bond. But if I wasn't her father I would be the kind of person she would have nothing to do with."

It exacerbates how much of an outsider he feels, as a resident of London unable to speak English ("I feel like I've come through customs but am still collecting luggage"), a citizen of China stripped of his authorial voice - but he knows this distance is also his strength. He was in Hong Kong when the Tiananmen protests started and he returned to see what was going on. "I was there, in the mass of sweaty bodies swaying the square" - but because he was older, a writer and outcast, he just watched. (Beijing Coma details not just the brutality of the authorities, but the callow confusion and power struggles among the students.) On May 28 1989, his brother had an accident and Ma dashed to his bedside. It was there he heard about the massacre. It felt, he says, as though everyone he knew had been killed, or spiritually crushed, and in what would, years later, give him a guiding metaphor, only his brother, freed into a coma, seemed safe.

Ma sees the coma as a stroke of luck for him, too: "Not only because I might have ended up among the dead, but also for my work as a writer. Many people who witnessed Tiananmen firsthand have been unable to write about it, and that distance, and the fact that I had to reimagine it, and piece bits together, means that I've been able to look at it in the cold light of day and really examine its importance." He hopes to be able to do the same again about the coming days.

· Beijing Coma, translated by Flora Drew, is published by Chatto & Windus.